Loveless
by Reno Spiegel
Summary: [NaNoWriMo 2005] Four years after ShinRa falls, Reno's gotten the short end of the stick due to a bad financial department, and it only gets worse.
1. I

_All of a sudden, there's a bullet in Ma's forehead._

_I'm just impressed he got into the room without me hearing him._

"_I take it," I say, standing from the bed and turning to face the man holding the smoking gun in the doorway. He's still got my knife in his side, and I'll be damned before I'm sorry about it. ". . .You found the spare key?"_

**LOVELESS**

**Chapter I**

My name's Reno.

At nineteen, I became a Turk, and at twenty-three, we were disbanded, a collective decision on the part of myself, my two best friends, and a spirit we all knew was in the office. Even if it was a while ago, we've still all managed to keep in touch. We all moved to Junon and I've been sleeping on Rude's couch since they kicked me out of my apartment. Elena tries to see us when she can pull herself off her job at the paper.

Oh, yeah. Happy birthday to me; I turned twenty-seven last week. I got a bottle of bourbon; a new pair of shoes. There was also a signed script from my favorite play, and Elena when came downtown to drop it off, she sewed the button back onto my suit jacket for the seventh time in four years. Wonderful girl, Laney, lemme tell ya.

We split the bourbon, the three of us, and went to the bar.

But all things end, and so here I am, six days later, leaning against a pillar in the newly-constructed Junon train station, waiting for the next to pull in. I'm wearing jeans, a shirt that's ripped up the back from a fence I didn't successfully hop over, but my coat's taking care of that. My hair's shorter these days, because. . .well, we'll get into that later. Right now, I'm in a good mood and don't want to bring myself back into that funk. These tattoos on my cheeks still make me look like a fucking hyena, but I don't feel like having laser surgery that close to my eyes.

Heh. Yeah. Like I can afford it, anyway.

I'm checking my watch again when the grind of steel on steel reaches me. It's two fifty-seven, and the petals of the rose bouquet crooked up behind my back are brushing against my neck like some high-school bully whispering death threats in my ear. That's me. Reno Gust, the romantic.

Oh, yeah, that's right. My last name's Gust. I remember, walking toward the train, when they had me assigned to Hojo for a month or so as his personal assistant. It drove him nuts, because when they called me on the PA system, the secretary's accent made it sound just like 'Gast.' He was an A-plus fuckwit, though, so whatever. I catch myself thinking about stuff like that a lot these days; memories of ShinRa. . .not fuckwits. Though they do seem to correspond a lot.

Cell phone jammed in her ear and a briefcase in her hand, my date steps off the train, yelling at somebody about something. It's probably Brent, the guy running the convention tonight. I haven't heard her talk to him _without_ yelling at him, and from the one time I spoke to him, I'd be the same way. She almost walks right past me in distraction.

Goddamn, woman, you're a workaholic.

". . .and I hope he pisses in your soup!" She hangs up the phone as my hand touches her back, then she turns around and brandishes it at me. If she keeps doing cute shit like this, I might haul off and tell her I love her or something, lemme tell ya. She sighs, giggles at herself, and kisses me. "You'll drive me to drink yet, Gust," she laughs.

Ah, the innocent type; how attractive ye be. I hand her the flowers and smile at her. "I know I didn't have to," I cut her off. I love the way her eyebrows scrunch up when she's been beaten. I notice she's been doing it a lot more since I told her that, too. "But have I got a surprise for you."

"I dunno. Do ya?"

Har dee har. Tiffany Minster is the partial owner of a law firm in town, has more money than the Promised Land has hype, and still managed to ask _me _what time it was when she saw me sitting outside the limo service. I don't even want to know whether she thought I was a chauffeur or not; something about gift chocobos and their beaks. ( To tell you the truth, I was stealing hubcaps and pawning them off around the corner to help with rent for the month. ) A week later I was borrowing Rude's car and credit card to take her out to eat. A month and a half afterward, I told her they weren't really mine.

Wanna know how to make me feel special? Take the sentence "I'm unemployed and sleep on my best friend's couch" in stride, then tell me you don't care. I'll propose on spot. I might've if I hadn't choked on the straw I'd been chewing on.

We're inside a coffee shop in the station now, and I'm pulling the chair out for her. Yeah, don't give me that look; I told you, I'm in a good mood. I thump her on the head and smirk, because she's giving me the same look, and tell her the unemployed aren't all impolite scum. Just my friends.

"Such a nut," she mutters, shaking her head, and she ordersa cappuccino, like she always does. They don't even take my order, because anyone in the coffee business of Junon knows that I always take mine straight black, so a nod just means 'gimme some.' "So what's the big surprise, Mr. All-Smiles?"

It only gets bigger, babe.

I reach over the table, grab one of her hands – goddamn, the size of the rocks in the rings she wears, I swear – and breathe out. "I—. . ." I draw it out. She leans forward. ". . .Stopped drinking."

For a second I think she might go into convulsions. I told her about how much I've been relying on alcohol since ShinRa went down, and she's been against it from the beginning, about four months back. She's been encouraging me to quit ever since, but to make it a complete surprise, I kept my progress to myself. I've been down to one drink a week for the past month, didn't even have any when I went out on my birthday, but she still thought I was hitting the bottle as regularly as ever.

"Reno!" she laughs, and for the first time in a long while, I feel like someone's proud of me. "Wow, that's fantastic!"

If it weren't for Tiff, I never would've done it. "C'mon, babe, don't sound so surprised. Definitely a better reaction that I got outta Laney and Rude." I blame it on the years of being a Turk and being given things to not care. They looked happy for a second, then went on with their card game, telling me they were glad I had, but would I be their designated when they went out? Having never had any intention of leaving them alone on a drinking night, I'll be more than happy to do it. "But anyway, how's work?"

I don't like talking about myself all that much, and I'm glad she's okay with changing the subject to the firm and things.

She launches into the past few days; all the cases she's handled, everything going on with her workers, the gossip of the neighborhood. By the time she's done, she's downed three cappuccinos, I've had two cups of coffee myself, and we're headed out the door. The air is colder than when we walked in. Convention nights always seem to be cold, and she goes to a lot, so I always end up lending her my jacket for the night, like I am now.

"Y'know, without that thing, you wouldn't get nearly the respect you do."

"Yeah?" She looks at me, clearly in doubt. "And if this thing's supposed to get you respect, then why's Rude always towing you around by the collar?"

Which reminds me, I need to have Laney reinforce the stitching next time I see her. I forgot to ask last week. "Because," I say, slinging an arm around her shoulders, "Rude is a foot taller than me and almost seventy-five pounds heavier." In short, slang terms: a fucking lummox. "You know what that means?" She guesses that means he's stronger. "Nope, 'just means his respect coat's bigger than mine."

She rolls her eyes, just like everyone else in life, but at least she's being nice about it. "Well, I think I'm the only one in the city dating an ex-Turk, so maybe I'll get some ideas out _and_ win the lottery today."

As relaxed as I am with her, the instincts kicked in the second we got outside, and we're getting some strange looks. Then again, she's walking along in a cream-coloured outfit that a lot of people couldn't even dream of affording, and she's walking with a guy who used to be a Turk; now I've got jeans that look like they've seen a run-in with the farm and that shirt that didn't make the fence. My hair sure as hell hasn't gotten any nicer since then, either, lemme tell ya.

I only see one guy with a gun all the way to the centre, and he's a Force officer. I mention the dropped crime rate to her, my hands on her shoulders, and she says it's all because the world revolves around her. I kiss her for that one, because I _know_ I'm rubbing off on her.

She leans up and mutters into my ear, "Pick me up tonight and I'll finally give you your birthday present." I chuckle, kiss her cheek, and send her on her way, knowing her well enough by now to know she's probably talking about a box of chocolates or something. I take a seat next to the door once she's inside, lighting a cigarette.

Don't give me that look either. Smokes are next on my quit-list.

Like I said, my instincts kicked in right when we left the door, so I'm not shocked when someone snags my lighter out of my hand. Rude sits down next to me and gives me a long look before he smiles. "Proud," is the first word he mutters. "She's a keeper."

I debate asking him whether or not I'm a keeper myself, then I realize how stupid that would sound coming from one former killer to another. 'Scuse me, Ace, as somebody who used to shoot rapists with me, do you think I'd be good for a long-time commitment?' I think he'd think I was trying to rape _him_ and give me five seconds to be out of his sights. Yeah, definitely not a question to ask him.

I should mention: Rude makes it a habit, when he doesn't have work and I'm not in the apartment, to go out into the city and track me down, just for the sport of it. Sometimes he finds me, other times I get back before he does. It's a lot of fun, really, because years of working together got us used to each other's presence, so we have this kind of. . .internal tracking device on each other. Laney, too, but she's always working. I'll walk him for miles around a block to piss him off. He usually jogs to catch me and smacks me in the back of the neck when I do that.

"Seen Derrick?" he asks.

I shake my head. Derrick's a short little shit that runs around downtown Junon, a dealer of sorts. We don't go to him, but he's always looked up to the two of us since we saved him from a couple of thugs who were complaining about five hundred gil their friend was down. Rude keeps an eye on him a lot of the time, to make sure he's not getting in too much trouble.

Yep, that's us. We find a sixteen-year-old dealing hard drugs and not only do we _not _pull him off the street, but we make sure no one else does. I take a drag and a picture flashes through my head.

Rude and I.

Our suits and sunglasses.

My mag-rod pointed outward.

"Freedom fighters of a different breed."

I relay it to Rude and start to laugh. "That'd make a hell of a movie, eh?" He raises a brow at me, probably because the guy sleeping on his couch and leeching his smoke money just proposed we make a high-budget action flick. Yuffie Kisaragi as the lead female. Rude's the gunman. I'm the kickass driver, squealing around corners to run down cops. Rudolph the Cueball throws a bag of gil at the thug on the ground and says something inspirationally tough, like, "Nothing personal."

"Antiheroes to the max, motherfucker." He gives me an even more bemused look, as if asking me to explain what kind of acid trip my mind is on, and I shake it off as I stand up. "No big, man. You gotta work tonight?"

His response is standing up, pulling a crumpled visor from his back pocket. He smacks it against the side of the convention centre, throwing his cigarette with one of the swings, and puts it on. Poor Rude's been reduced to head cook at the Eighth Avenue Club.

I told him to buy a hairnet just to fuck with 'em.

The bald man starts handing me the spare key. "You'll be back before me." I try to take it from him, but he tightens his grip at the last second and lets me see his eyes over his shades. They're fucking creepy, lemme tell ya. "If I come home. . ."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." I swipe the key, knowing what the end of that sentence is. Holy knows he tells me every time he goes to work. He should be a butler, as regular as he is. "No sex or you'll box my ears –" – _Dad. _I grin, and I can kind of see him do it, too. It's small. Too small for anyone not looking for it to see. ( Did I mention bad grammar was part of the reason I dropped out of school? ) I punch him in the shoulder and start heading back toward the apartment.

"'Ey, Re!"

Ah, now there's a neighbor I don't try to pick fights with. The Widow – her name's Margaret, but she doesn't look one bit like some dainty little Maggie – is a seventy-something, retired steel worker. She's in better shape than I am, has more tattoos than Rude does – if you've seen his, you were either fooling around with him or he was piss-drunk, I'll bet – and just might outlive both of us. Her husband died when his plane went down over Wutai, poor woman, but she's holding up real well.

The Widow, hair up in a bun and the sleeves of her grey flannel rolled up, leans out the propped-open door toward me. She's got a box in her arms, the kind of box anyone else over fifty would ask me to lift for them, but I know she could balance the thing on her head if she wanted. The old bird's buff as hell, and she packs one mean punch, lemme tell ya. Took her drinking a year or so back. The bartender tried to cut her off at three and she broke his nose.

Free tap the rest of the night, and it was glorious.

"What's up, Widow?" She knows the nickname isn't something I'm doing to pick on her. When an ex-Turk calls you somethin' like that, she told me once, it's a damned compliment. With her husband in the service, she came to actually like the company, and she considers us to be great people and fantastic neighbors. I wish there were more people around like her. If my grandma'd been more Widow-ish and less. . .grandmother-ish, I would've actually wanted to go stay with her once in a while. But, no, she was into that whole _cookie-baking _thing, and. . .well, you get it.

She looks me up and down, steps forward, and nudges me in the knee with her foot. "I'll bet I don't need two guesses whether you've got a job yet, y'slacker." She cocks her head and gives me a smile. It's amazing how someone that's got forty years on me can be so much more of a child than I can.

I laugh, "Oh, and you do?"

That's always my comeback, and she's been using the same answer since I met her: "Reno, I'm livin' on government money, and I couldn't be happier. Wanna sell some flower pots?" She balances the box on her hip and opens the lid. Rows and rows of 'em. Ceramic, brown-orange flower pots. . . .Widow, I'm not even gonna try to guess why you have so many of those. I just don't wanna know.

I start off down the hall with a wave, tossing the key as I do. "Y'know, there's a couch in Rude's apartment just begging to have me lay on it. Otherwise, I'd definitely take you up on that, lemme tell ya."

"Hold it!"

I turn around, and she's almost got a serious look on her face. The door clicks shut behind her, and her face scrunches up. "Lemme tell ya, lemme tell ya. You've been sayin' that for months now, kid. An ex-Turk, and your catch-phrase is 'lemme tell ya.'" I turn around and walk, so she can't see how hard I want to laugh, but she just calls, "Not 'fuck you, you old bat,' not 'fuck off and stay fucked,' not even 'eat shit and die.' It's 'lemme tell ya!' Here's one for ya, Re!"

I glance over my shoulder. The Widow's always worth turning your head; she flips me off and shouts, "You're a damn dirty loser, punk!" We laugh it off together as I slip into the apartment and she disappears in the general direction of the dumpster.

Didn't I tell you she was cool? If you had a grandma like her, you'd sacrifice all the baked goods in the world.

. . .Lemme tell ya.

-

**Author's Note**: Because I'm an unoriginal little freak, this is actually my NaNoWriMo project for the year, and I decided to do it in fanfiction form. However, to save myself a bit of originality, there're going to be quite a few original characters, it's in first-person-present-tense ( Hello, _Silver Rose_, how've you been? ) and slightly auto-biographical, though hopefully not in a self-insertion sense. Hyphen abuse aside, that's what's going on. Have fun, and reviews keep me on task. Aiming for fifty or sixty thousand words by the end of the month, y'know.


	2. II

**LOVELESS**

**Chapter II**

Tiffany never made it over last night, but she did bother to call and say she wouldn't. I wake up, make my morning check of Rude's room, and find him sleeping face down. It's no big. He does it all the time; remembered how to do it from SOLDIER, in case he needed to pretend to be dead. His breathing's even shallow. . .should I go che – nope, there's the snore.

Keep on, man.

. . .You creepazoid fuck.

I laugh and wonder if I should wake him up and tell him what I just dubbed him, then decide to check the calendar first. Last week. . .my birthday was a. . .hold on, I'll get it. . .that's right, it's Tuesday. Holy Day. I wake up the big bald man in the back room, relay that information to him, and he promises he'll get up in a few minutes.

I crack my back with one hand and run the other through my hair. That couch does a number on me, lemme tell y – note to self, Re, the Widow's right. I make a note to change 'lemme tell ya' to 'you creepazoid fuck,' but something tells me the transition won't take.

But first. . .we've gotta go to church.

I suppose the idea of the two of us in church is kinda weird for someone to think about without us telling them why we're doing it, so here's the deal: Since the end of ShinRa was such a wake-up call, we woke up and noticed that we'd been fucking with a lot of people over the years and we should probably stop. I mean, c'mon, we killed more than a few people, we had our way with the benefits, and we decided that whole karma thing was probably gonna nip us later.

Since then, we've been heading to church every Holy Day – terrible name, trust me, I know, but it's not like I got put in charge of the holiday planning – and hoping some higher being's gonna tell us what to do one of these days. We _could _have gone on killing, drinking, doing drugs, and the whole nine, but the leaf turned and we decided it wasn't in our best interests.

I suppose ano –

**WHAM. **Rude trips over his own feet on the way into the kitchen and almost knocks himself out on one of the chais. Nice one, Ace. "You wanna eat before we go, right?"

No response is a good response. . .err. . .a positive response. . .or. . .I turn the stove on and give up on eloquence for a while. Somehow I always find myself doing the cooking, but I really don't mind. Sometimes Rude minds, but he'll eat anything I put in front of him. . .thank Holy.

A few minutes later I kick him in the side and he wakes up again, pulling himself into a chair and slipping on the shades he left in the middle of the table last night. "What's on?"

When you live with him, you learn what his short responses are supposed to mean. I turn up the burner. "Scales. Ain't too hungry myself, you?" He shakes his head and rubs at his temples. The man looks like he's hungover and pissed off every morning, which is a large part of why he doesn't like people staying over – too nice for his own good, the lummox. "How was work?"

He shrugs and looks around, probably for his cigarettes, but I can't help him there. "Work's work," he tells me. "Cooking's cooking." I bank on the hope that one of these days, he'll actually tell me he had a good time in the kitchen. I suggest to him that he needs to sneak off and get hammered one night while he's on the clock, and he laughs. "Cameras."

"You know what, then?" I slam a plate down in front of him. Skin a dragon, cook the scales; if you're not from around here, lemme tell ya, it's good eatin's. "Take my ideas, piss off to work, then tell me you ain't had a good day, alright?"

He takes a bite and shakes his head again, finally starting to enter the real world. I sit down with my own meal and a cup of coffee that I remember seeing on the counter last night. Cold. Black. But with the amazing lack of bugs in Rude's apartment, it should be safe. I don't care if you think it's disgusting; I just think it's less expensive.

We eat in silence, as it is with most mornings – creepazoid fuck, what'd I tell you? – and he's the first to leave the room to change. I get the dishes done while he does that, then go and put on my own funeral suit. Not a suit for my own funeral, I mean. We just decided that, instead of going to Holy Day service in the colors of killers, we'd spend some of the company's severance pay on two black suits.

That's another thing I should explain. A lot of the time, people ask how, with all my earnings from being a Turk, I could be homeless, and the answer's a lot more simple than you might think. Basically, the idea of being an assassin is that you don't want a lot of people to know you are one. . .and because we totally fucked up the part of not walking around outside with the suits on, the ShinRa family had a plan for us that left us financially screwed when the company came down. They would give us anything we wanted so long as we filled out an order form, and they would give it to us with nothing else attached. If I'd wanted a new car, completely unrelated to the job, they would've given it to me. I'm talking _anything._ Of course, the downfall of the system for us was that it meant they didn't have to pay us regularly anymore.

And thus, when the order forms and presidents go away, we're left with no gil – aside from the bit that the government gave us as severance pay because the new company wants nothing to do with the blood on our hands, and like I said, we went and bought church suits – and we've gotta fend for ourselves. It's a real pain in the ass, lemme tell ya. I just can't seem to get off mine and find someplace to work.

"Hey, Rude!" I hear the water running, and the reply is mumbled. I caught him brushing his teeth. I hop around on one foot, pulling my pants on, and ask, "How cold is it out there?"

I can feel him shrug once in a while.

"Lemme rephrase." I give him a few seconds, but maybe that's because I can't seem to hold a conversation and put on a three-piece suit at the same time. I can drive around at high speeds, keep a conversation going with someone barely hanging onto their guts in the back seat, and shoot out my window at the fucker behind us – my car, Reeve, irritated Wutains, my rookie days, respectively – but when it comes to walking and chewing gum, you can go to hell. "Are we driving?"

There's a pause, then his arm sticks itself into the hallway and he throws a tube of toothpaste at me. He misses by about three feet. Mornings are a long process around here, and that's his usual sign for, _'Reno, you're a _( here's where you put the appropriate insult, based on Rude's coherency )_, of course we're _( and here's where you insert appropriate action. )_'_ If anyone else lived here, they'd just think he was an ass. "Hey, man, screw you. It's September. It _might _be cold."

"You're just lazy." He opens the medicine cabinet and digs for the antidepressants he seems to misplace everyday. A lot of people don't know the big guy who never smiles and seems inept at five-word sentences is on pep-pills, and the ones who do know tend to not believe it. I tell them to imagine him without 'em. Usually gets a shudder.

Everything as figured out as it is, we're at church in a matter of half an hour, after two cigarettes apiece and a bottle of water between us. All the usuals are here, as expected, and we take our seats next to the Widow in the back. Up front is the pew of the preacher's kids and his wife; the rest of the tenants of the apartments are all around us, somewhere, except for the guy upstairs that we heard coming down with something; Tiffany's not here, but she lives closer to the other church we go to for the buffet days; something tells me Derrick's in here with his mother, but there's no way we'd let her know that he talks to us; a few homeless people are in the pew next to us, always are, and never seem to get any better; and of course, in a seat a few rows ahead of us with two bodyguards, there's Toshi Arakaru, who. . .well, I'll get to that. Let's just say that between the two of us, we have the oddest relationship I know of. He's only been here twice, but he feels like a regular.

Service drags today, but aside from a few things I have to repeat to the Widow, it's not horrible. Average Tuesday nonsense; a few fanatics who swear the end is near. . .same people that've been saying it for four years, unsurprisingly. After it's all over, Rude heads outside with a few of his friends from work, telling me he's going off to have a few drinks ( those fanatics make me want a few, too ) and I find Toshi.

The bodyguards know me by now, and walk away to stand by the door, pretending to look busy. If I were anyone else, he'd have them stand in front of him, but, y'know, I'm an ex-Turk and know more than they do. There've been a few times I came close to asking him for a job, lemme tell ya. He slides a list of names into my pocket as I walk past, and I stop on the other side of him, back to back. "How's it goin', Toshi?"

Toshi Arakaru is, if the name didn't tip you off, a Wutain who has more gil in his bank accounts than the WEAPONs had in property damage. Today he's wearing his favorite suit, a dark grey, pinstriped thing with lapels that stick out irritatingly far ( looks like a fucking birthday clown, and I've told him that ); he's got a trimmed goatee, short black hair, and grey eyes ( the left one's fake, if you want to sneak up on him. ) He and Rude are perfect for each other when it comes to how much emotion they show.

You're wondering why he's got bodyguards and gil, I'm sure. As the son of one of Godo Kisaragi's most trusted consultants, he learned a lot about business early in life, and unlike most kids with that going for them, he kept with it. Everything kind of snowballed, and after the earnings off two businesses he owned were put together, he had enough to. . .y'know. . .buy ShinRa.

I guess I could hate him for putting me out of a job and turning everything I used to stand for into just one big credit card company – yeah, that's what they're doing with the building; the reactors that withstood Meteor are still providing power to a lot of places, but Toshi sold them to Kalm in exchange for enough to make the building look new after it got blown to shards – but he's an alright guy otherwise. Besides, he has knows what I need to know; he slides me a piece of paper every time he comes into town, usually about once a month. If he doesn't call at midnight, I figure he'll be at church, and here he is.

It was a dirty trick, but after Toshi and I got to know each other – two years ago I tried to go back into the building for some things I left in the basement, his guards threw fits and nabbed me, and for some reason we started talking – he decided to help me out. Given the fact that my 'raid' had been reported on the news, he exaggerated it to say that the old Turks had tried to attack the place and he needed information on people who wanted to track us down and get rid of us in exchange for a nice amount of gil. With over five-hundred letters by the end of the month, most with info and pictures, he had a lot of names of people that wanted, and still want, to make sure Rude and I shut up for a good long while. Every month he calls ten more people, tells them to set out on the hunt, and gives me ten more names in exchange for me keeping him updated on what goes on under the corporate world. It's an uneven trade; Holy knows I'm getting a lot more out of it than he is, but he's got enough power to keep himself happy. Or. . .y'know. . .smilelessly content.

Like I said, it's a damn weird relationship, and I don't even know if we can call each other friends, but now I know who's pissed off at me. I think the number of letters he got pissed me off enough to make me want to go through with it when my back was against the wall.

"Business is business, as life is life," he tells me. I can't see what he's doing, but I hear sunglasses unfold. I've heard that sound about three-thousand times over the years. "Ready?"

I laugh a bit, leaning backward into him and putting a piece of paper into his back pocket. My monthly summary of what's going on in the streets. Maybe I don't find my own place because I know I would lose touch with crime and kill this deal I have going. Whatever; it's working. "'Course I am, Mister Arakaru." I turn around and shove him over the pew, knocking him on his ass, and my mag-rod comes out.

I'm slow, because he gets a kick into my cheek on his way down, and _fuck_, does it hurt. He grabs my weapon and pulls himself up, almost yanking my goddamn elbow out of its socket, and sinks his fist into my gut. This guy's no pushover by any means, and what I think's interesting's that he does know a damn thing about martial arts. All his time in Wutai he spent learning about business-owning, but once he started doing it, he watched his gil pile up and started pulling criminals off the street. Giving them enough of his earnings to shut 'em up, they taught him how to fight dirty and he's been getting better ever since. That's one of the reasons I like these meetings so much; I understand the concept of trying to knock someone's teeth out.

He's a fucking genius, lemme tell ya. One of those guys who knows he can buy the Promised Land, and actually tries to do it. So to speak. In other words. Something like that, fuck if I know; like I said, my schooling got me as far as shooting, then I had to drop one. The gun under the couch is probably a tip-off.

I try not to double, but it feels like he hit something he knew to aim for, and I slug him in the chest for it, putting away the rod with my other hand. He goes down hard from that, the wind out of him, and I book it for the door. Like I figured, his guards have their guns at me, and I plough through the one on the left to throw myself outside. I can't tell if he purposely went down easily or not, but I don't really care. Rude's running over, pulling on his gloves, and he throws one of his paws into the other guard, because the idiot's bending over his partner. I know Rude wouldn't have normally gotten involved in this, but he thought it was a stupid move to let down your guard in the line of fire, so that was his way of saying it.

I'm almost in the car when a bullet hits my heel, from the guy I downed earlier, so I jump across the seat into the passenger's side just in time for the big bald man to get in behind me and peel out of our space.

I've been shot plenty of times, otherwise I'd probably be swearing myself blue in the face over my fucking foot. That and he only actually hit the heel of my shoe – so I turn to Rude and start bitching about needing new ones now. He refuses to respond, which either means he's mad about me "starting fights" or he just doesn't care. "I thought you were headin' for the bar, anyway."

"Thought you might need help."

Whenever Toshi and I meet somewhere public, we have to duke it out in one of these hellacious brawls so we look like we actually hate each other. If we didn't get such a rush out of a fight once in awhile, we'd probably say screw the plan because it's too much of a hassle. That's why we go all-out with the hard hits and guns; authenticity's important, sure, but when it comes down to it, we just wanna hit each other. I usually tell Rude when it's going down, though, just so he can make sure I don't wind up fucked.

I unfold the list, set it on my knees, and look for the alcohol swabs in the glove box. Yeah, that's right, we keep stuff to clean up fights in the car; we were Turks, so we get in fights probably more often than we need to. Don't give me that look. "You kiddin', man? I had him, you and I both know it." Damn, that stings. I think he knocked something loose in my neck, too.

"You mean something in your head?"

What? Oh. . .err. . . I give him a weird look and laugh at myself. "Did I say that out loud?" Rude nods at me. Yeah, that kick to the cheek kind of disoriented me. Whenever I get knocked around a bit, I tend to lose track of what I think and what I say. 'Course, that's probably because I've been getting knocked around since I was a kid. "But, yeah, I had him. If you'd been in there. . ."

Rude shakes his head again, and he smirks in that certain little way. "Reputation's better every time you hit him," he tells me, and we laugh at it together. I suppose beating up the owner of what used to be ShinRa – it's called LSA these days, but I don't remember what that stands for right now – doesn't exactly show great respect for anyone, huh?

Then again, kicking an ex-Turk in the face doesn't really show a lot of brains, either.

We talk for awhile about how, someday, we'll have to have a huge fight in one of the local taverns. Akamaru, FrikFrak – that's what I call his bodyguards when I'm feeling lazy, but their real names are Riola ( taller ) and Merrick ( shorter ) – Rude, and I in a fist-throwing, table-breaking, knock-down barroom brawl. It'll be like the old movies, with or without Yuffie Kisaragi as the female lead.

". . .Hey, Rude, was her real name Yu Fei?"

He gives me a weird look that I feel on the side of my head, but I wave it off. You remember that list with the pictures Toshi gave me?

One of the fuckers has been tailing me for weeks.


End file.
